The sizes, masses and specific star formation rates of massive galaxies at 1.3 < z < 1.5: strong evidence in favour of evolution via minor mergers

By R. McLure, H. Pearce, J. Dunlop, M. Cirasuolo, E. Curtis-Lake, V. Bruce, K. Caputi, O. Almaini, D. Bonfield, E. Bradshaw and 5 more. 2012

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We report the results of a comprehensive study of the relationship between galaxy size, stellar mass and specic star-formation rate (sSFR) at redshifts 1 :3 6 10 10 M ), spectroscopic sample from the UKIDSS Ultra- deep Survey (UDS), with accurate stellar-mass measurements derived from spectro- photometric tting, we nd no evidence that the o-set from the local size- mass relation is a function of stellar population age. In contrast, we nd that massive star-forming galaxies at this epoch lie closer to the local late-type size-mass relation and are only a factor fg = 1:6 0:2 smaller than observed locally. Based on a sub- sample with dynamical mass estimates, which consists of both passive and star-forming objects, we also derive an independent estimate of fg = 2:3 0:3 for the typical growth in half-light radius between z' 1:4 and the present day. Focusing on the passive sub- sample, we conclude that to produce the necessary evolution predominantly via major mergers would require an unfeasible number of merger events and over populate the high-mass end of the local stellar mass function. In contrast, we nd that a scenario in which mass accretion is dominated by minor mergers can comfortably produce the necessary evolution, whereby an increase in stellar mass of only a factor of' 2, accompanied by size growth of a factor of ' 3:5, is required to reconcile the size- mass relation at z' 1:4 with that observed locally. Finally, we note that a signicant fraction (44% 12%) of the passive galaxies in our sample have a disk-like morphology, providing additional evidence that separate physical processes are responsible for the quenching of star-formation and morphological transformation in massive galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12874bd746e696ca3b0ef6de8bfba3bfac029c59

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Citations in the corpus

The Evolution of Galaxy Structure Over Cosmic Time (2014, background): “The most popular explanation is that this size increase is produced through minor mergers (e.g., Bluck et al. 2012; McLure et al. 2013), although other ideas such as AGN performing work on gas is another idea (e.g., Bluck et al. 2011).”
The KMOS Redshift One Spectroscopic Survey (KROSS):dynamical properties, gas and dark matter fractions of typical z~1 star-forming galaxies (2016, background): “1: UDS, Bradshaw et al. (2013), McLure et al. (2013), Smail et al. (2008), Akiyama et al. (in preparation) and Simpson et al. (in preparation).”
Inferring the star formation histories of massive quiescent galaxies with bagpipes: evidence for multiple quenching mechanisms (2017, background): “The denser, earlier-quenching systems are theorised to gradually expand through processes such as minor mergers to leave one population of relatively large quiescent galaxies by the present epoch (e.g. McLure et al. 2013).”
Identification of the brightest Lyα emitters at z = 6.6 : Implications for the evolution of the luminosity function in the reionization era (2015, background): “None of our LAE candidates are in the zCOSMOS (Lilly et al. 2009) or UDSz (Bradshaw et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013) catalogues, which we also did not expect, since they would likely be interlopers in that case.”
MORPHOLOGIES OF ∼190,000 GALAXIES AT z = 0–10 REVEALED WITH HST LEGACY DATA. I. SIZE EVOLUTION (2015, methodology): “3 (e.g., van der Wel et al. 2014) and z & 3− 4 Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) selected in the dropout technique (Steidel et al. 1999) (e.g., Trujillo et al. 2006; Toft et al. 2007, 2009; Dahlen et al. 2007; Grazian et al. 2012; Huang et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013).”
STELLAR MASSES FROM THE CANDELS SURVEY: THE GOODS-SOUTH AND UDS FIELDS (2014, methodology): “…with reliable spectroscopic redshifts that we have extended in the present analysis with new redshifts derived from the VLT VIMOS/FORS2 spectroscopic campaigns (Bradshaw et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013; O. Almaini et al., in preparation) and the MAGELLAN/IMACS spectroscopy presented in Appendix A.”
Second data release of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (2019, methodology): “The list includes redshifts from zCOSMOS DR3 (Lilly et al. 2009), UDSz (Bradshaw et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013), 3DHST (Skelton et al. 2014; Momcheva et al. 2016), FMOSCOSMOS (Silverman et al. 2015; Kashino et al. 2019), VVDS (Le Fèvre et al. 2013), VIPERS PDR1 (Garilli et al. 2014), SDSS DR12…”
Structural and Star-forming Relations since z ∼ 3: Connecting Compact Star-forming and Quiescent Galaxies (2015, background): “…cores eventually results in the prominence of disks with bulges among massive SFGs and quiescent galaxies at z & 1 reported in previous works (e.g., Bundy et al. 2010; Bruce et al. 2012; Bruce et al. 2014a; Buitrago et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013; Lang et al. 2014; HuertasCompany et al 2015).”
Photometric Redshifts for Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program Data Release 1 (2017, methodology): “We first collect spectroscopic redshifts from the literature: zCOSMOS DR3 (Lilly et al. 2009), UDSz (Bradshaw et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013), 3D-HST (Skelton et al. 2014; Momcheva et al. 2016), FMOS-COSMOS (Silverman et al. 2015), VVDS (Le Fèvre et al. 2013), VIPERS PDR1 (Garilli et al. 2014),…”